Stella this morning looking towards the sun, her position concealing the large open, untreatable tumor on her face that is the reason she is currently in hospice care.
Stella’s human is enduring a personal emergency and was called away from her girl but Stella is a cat that gets twice daily insulin, pain meds shot down her throat and painful cleaning/dressing her face wound then mere seconds after these insults, pulls herself back to center. Sitting then with me on the slope of their driveway, watching squirrels perform their life on the roof across the street. The silver lining to Stella’s pain is her very own self.
As she and I watched this morning, one of the squirrels parkour’d down from the roof of the tan building on the left and ran to the yard next door. Then, standing up and looking around casually, surveyed the scene as if having decided that the vibes were real good.
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My sister and her wife came up with the idea–and name–for my pet sitting business.
I was divorced in 2007—thought he was going through a midlife crisis that would pass; I didn’t even get a lawyer—and went back to school to become a teacher, reaching past a mere certificate (out of a mix of pride and snobbery perhaps) to get a masters, spending my limited time receiving alimony (three years) studying for a future job that’d allow me to be creative as well as be with my girls as much as possible. In the still-shaky economic ground of late 2011–alimony and masters both done–when I hadn’t gotten a job and was really struggling, my sister told me about her friend’s mom who had a pet sitting business that was doing well, and with my sister and her wife’s creativity, we set the ball rolling. I then did part-time gigs as Reading teacher, technology teacher, PE teacher, because my goal was still to be a teacher—pet sitting my side gig–but those jobs still weren’t enough money and when it became impossible to get to the schools on time while doing morning sits, I juggled as best I could.
My girls were going through very serious struggles of their own during this time and I was trying to keep them from completely crashing—I knew we were so close; my co-parent disagreed—plus my car got totaled and I didn’t have money to get another one, a principal at one of my schools illegally cut my pay/it got ugly, I was asking for help (even just with me menialities) from wherever I could and getting flatlined, and other things until in the tsunami of misfortunes, I became so overwhelmed there were many days when I didn’t want to live to see the end of them. I wasn’t suicidal necessarily—didn’t have a plan, never did anything—but at some point—unfortunately many people can attest to—there becomes more reason to explain your way out of living than reasons to stay. “The girls have James and Kerry and the kids….” while driving next to that cliff on northbound I-215 one morning—still so clear in my gut—after Livy’d sent me a picture of her face post-panic while I was up on Brockbank tending Mildred and Missy. Livys (then-untreated) anxiety manifesting not just in panic and tears but in self-harm then a plan and then—thank fucking God—to a bed at UNI and some time at Teenscope.
I still have that picture; she’s completely dead already. Lost When you see your kids every day through the clarity of 100% honesty, you know when the shit is hitting the fan. Both girls having similar trials during the same time, blended with all the rest—including Livy having her first Grand Mal seizure in front of Julia (and her step-siblings)—made it easy to pack up my shit at Garfield Avenue, our longtime home. I cried in happiness after I mowed the grass for the last time in May 2015. Then pushed the mower to the driveway, put a “$20 obo” on it and by April 2016, had enough pet sitting to make a living and let go of being in education.
My main point is that I really fought to get where I am. Not only just with logistics but the slow, frightening plod of not even having basic needs met. And I’ve let go of what I wanted—time with my girls, giving them what I felt was a foundation for stability—and hustled, only to be fucked with and hassled by the casual cruelty of people who don’t know shit about shit so use their own talking as their primary source.
And even after things got better financially and emotionally for us, the stability sacrificed during our past, created holes in my self and the only thing I could focus on was working. I never said no to work–missed holidays, didn’t eat dinners together, didn’t go grocery shopping, didn’t clean—because everything was recalibrated to the rough times. And I worked and worked…and worked. So my kids always had a roof, so I’d never have to give up my pets.
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A few years ago, I had an experience with a kitty named Melman where I leaned down to him to tell him that I loved him, and he (uncharacteristically) started rolling around affectionately on his cat tree as if he knew exactly what I was saying. So I added, to keep this thing going, “Do you know what love means?” intending to breezily describe to him–with a mini-channeling of melodic words–the answer. For this is what I do for my life: I love creatures for a living. I come into their homes and listen to what they need to feel loved and safe. I read the room, and vary my words and my vibe until I nail it. But all at once, right there near Melman’s cat tree, I stood up and was speechless, unable to verbalize what I wanted to say. What did “love” mean for me and for Melman? How does the word or the vibes combine inside the body of an anxious orange introvert on a cat tree to where he rolls around in pleasure and I immediately want him to keep feeling that? What makes that happen?
And I had nothing–could say nothing/said nothing–suddenly understood that “love” isn’t something words can make truth from. And that “love” is so much bigger than me I can’t encapsulate what it is from within the limitations of myself.
So I left it alone, intending to just rest with the concept of it as it existed inside me until perhaps some day, from the brew of experiences—with self, daughters, animals, sunrises—I might have another go.
And for several years, I’ve done that.
This morning, as I looked up the driveway at Stella—her shadow reaching back towards me—the sunshine was like this Navajo folklore (pic).
My initial worry that her mom wouldn’t get back to see her before Stella’s end time has faded out from our visits together because animals aren’t like that. They don’t live where we do in that way. They live in the sunshine of the Navajo, where each day it rises to be the most beautiful sun there ever was. Where those squirrels jumping around in the gutters on the house across the street are the most entertaining thing she’s ever seen.
And as I made to leave her house after our visit, I walked up the street a bit towards my car and looked back to make sure she wasn’t following me. And she was. So I turned back, and sat with her again, in her sun.
Then when I got to my car, the music from my speakers was saying “… it’s the same old story, all love and glory, it’s a pantomime; looking for love in a looking glass world is pretty hard to do.” Mother of Pearl by Roxy Music.
And 2020 has been a year of potential disaster, and the trip wires were all set for me. Financially starting back at square one; trying to find my way to other opportunities but doing so unwillingly, with a bank account to match. And for a while this year, it felt personal. As if all that work—all the struggle, all the sacrifices—was going to start over, and repeat. Carving out a path of “this shit again?”, with all the players dancing around in convergence of a targeted apocalypse.
But the bigger truth about struggle is that the trauma can change you. It can crack you open to where you know you have nothing to fucking lose but to start seeing yourself and the world you’ve created differently.
Because, in sitting with “what is love?” I’ve come to understand that love is everything. Love is all of these words; it’s the struggle; the opportunity to see ourselves, to become, to reach around outside the barrenness so as to rise.
And had these days not arrived, again, I wouldn’t have believed this to be true.
Yet from this shift of worlds, with no idea of my next step, I drove home from Stella’s house living inside a moment where the sun is only alive for one day. For Love is growing and experiencing itself constantly from within us, and is a story we’ll never stop writing, nor would we want to.
This is Stella before her tumor. Stella, means star, like the sun.
Aimless...on a path to wherever 